Nor is it possible to obtain help from the great men of the past, because not one of them knew any more about death than you do yourself. Socrates, in Plato’s _Phædo_, Sir Thomas Browne in the _Religio Medici_ and the _Hydriotaphia_, Shakespeare in _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ and many other plays, St. Paul in various epistles, all tried to console us for the fact that we must die; the revolt against that inevitable end of beauty and ugliness, charm and horror, love and hate, is the most persistent note in literature; and there are few men who go through life without permitting themselves to wonder, “What is going to happen to me? Why should I have to die? What will my wife and children do after me? How is it possible that the world will go on, and apparently go on just the same as now, for ages after an important thing like me is shovelled away into a hole in the ground?” I suppose you have dreamed with a start of horror a dream in which you revisit the world, and looking for your own house and children, find them going along happily and apparently prosperous, the milkman coming as usual, a woman in the form of your wife ordering meals and supervising household affairs, the tax-gatherer calling--let us hope a little less often than when you were alive--the trams running and the ferry-boats packed as usual, and the sun shining, the rain falling sometimes, Members of Parliament bawling foolishly over nothing--all these things happening as usual; but you look around to see anybody resembling that beautiful and god-like creature whom you remember as yourself, and wheresoever you look he is not there. Where is he? How can the world possibly go on without him? Is it really going on, or is it nothing more than an incredible dream? And why are you so shocked and horror-stricken by this dream? You could hardly be more shocked if you saw you wife toiling in a garret for the minimum wage, or your children running about barefoot selling newspapers. The shocking fact is not that you have left them penniless, but that you have had to leave them at all. In the morning joy cometh as usual, and you go cheerfully about your work, which simply consists of postponing the day of somebody else’s death as long as you can. For a little time perhaps you will take particular note of the facts which accompany the act of death; then you will resign yourself to the inevitable, and continue doggedly to wage an endless battle in which you must inevitably lose, assured of nothing but that some day you too will lie pallid, your jaw dropped, your chest not moving, your face horribly inert; and that somebody will come and wash your body and tie up your jaw and put pennies on your eyes and wrap you in cerements and lift you into a long box; and that large men will put the box on their shoulders and lump you into a big vehicle with black horses, and another man will ironically shout Paul’s words, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”